Author: Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #20

A dissemination that destines the text to depart in ashes or go up in smoke (GT, 102)
The place from which Counterfeit Money, as a scene of gift and counterfeit money, departs, is a tobacco shop, a sign of the modernity that Baudelaire wants to apply “another’s procedure” to. Alongside this modernity is the older institution of tobacco itself, which “informs the essential decor of the scene.”

The two protagonists are linked by the possibility of smoking, of expending at a loss, for pure auto-effective pleasure, very close to the voice, this singular natural product that is tobacco. Rather than a limitless enquiry into tobacco, disseminated in smoke, Derrida contains his analysis within three rings: The Time of Woman and The “good hour” of the “Purloined Letter.” The final smoke ring is tobacco itself, asking:

What is tobacco?
Apparently it is the object of a pure and luxurious consumption. It appears that this consumption does not meet any natural need of the organism. It is a pure and luxurious consumption, gratuitous and therefore costly, an expenditure at a loss that produces a pleasure, a pleasure one gives oneself through the ingestive channel that is closest to auto-affection: the voice or orality. A pleasure of which nothing remains, a pleasure even the external signs of which are dissipated without leaving a trace: in smoke. If there is some gift—and especially if one gives oneself something, some affect or some pure pleasure—it may then have an essential relation, at least a symbolic or emblematic one, with the authorization one gives oneself to smoke. That at least is how it appears. But this appearance remains to be analyzed. (107)

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #19

Derrida’s concepts of “text” and “trace” (GT, 99-102)
Towards the conclusion of chapter 3 of Given Time, Derrida, after many detours, approaches the text of Counterfeit Money, asking “how is the question of the gift and the dative posed in Counterfeit Money?” Introducing the idea of the death of the donor as that which negates the return of the gift.

The text is finite, a “bit of corpus” it appears as a thing, which is a given in terms of our receptivity towards it, it was also given from the moment Baudelaire wrote and dedicated (gave) it. Yet it is a giving without return, whatever return Baudelaire might have counted on, the structure of trace and legacy of this text transcends the “phantasm of return” [the hau of the gift?] in the death of the signatory that accredits the text.

The problematic of the gift is only on the basis of the problematic of the trace and the text. This means not on the basis of the metaphysics of the present, that which is here now in the present. We do not get to the things themselves by avoiding “texts” by avoiding commentary or quotation, all writing is “on credit” subject to the authority of a commentary. It is only a problematic of the trace and dissemination [the giving of the text] that can pose a question of the gift and forgiveness, along with the “excessive forgetting or the forgetful excess that is radically implicated in the gift.” (102)

Text
The second paragraph of page 102 focuses on Counterfeit Money as a text which tells the story of a gift. The text is envisaged as a body, a corpus, that is destined, it is a given, without known signatory and known addressee, framed by its capacity to exceed and which exceeds its frame, it is the story within the story (abyme) which destines the text.

The Trace
“Experience as the experience of the present is never a simple experience of something present over and against me, right before my eyes as in an intuition; there is always another agency there. Repeatability contains what has passed away and is no longer present and what is about to come and is not yet present. The present therefore is always complicated by non-presence. Derrida calls this minimal repeatability found in every experience “the trace.” Indeed, the trace is a kind of proto-linguisticality (Derrida also calls it “arche-writing”), since language in its most minimal determination consists in repeatable forms.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Jacques Derrida entry)

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #18

This text, then, is also the piece, perhaps a piece of counterfeit money, that is, a machine for provoking events (96)

An incorruptible taste for refinement, paradox, and aporia
Jacques Derrida’s Given Time is a work which explores its central theme of the gift in terms of the impossible thinking of the aporia and the paradox, through a relentlessly uncompromising process of deconstructivist refinement.

In his final interview, with Le Monde in 2004, Derrida characterised the approach of his generation of French philosophers, as being governed by “an intransigent, even incorruptible, ethos of writing and thinking…without concession even to philosophy, and not letting public opinion, the media, or the phantasm of an intimidating readership frighten or force us into simplifying or repressing. Hence the strict taste for refinement, paradox, and aporia.”

Machine and Event
This taste for paradox and aporia is founded on what Derrida claimed was the biggest challenge for him and his contemporaries, the bringing together of the oppositional concepts of the machine and the event.

The machine is that which is capable of endless, automatic repetition, characterised by Derrida as an “indifferent automaton.” The event on the other hand, is the unique, the one-off, happening now and never to be repeated. It is associated with the organic, in which experience is inscribed into the living body. It is aesthetic in opposition to the machine, which is anaesthetic. For Derrida the very future of philosophy depends on the ability to think both the event and the machine as two indissociable concepts, but in a way in which neither one nor the other dominates:

“to give up neither the event nor the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, neither to reduce one to the other: this is perhaps a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of ‘us’ working for the last few decades.”

Derrida’s analysis 
Logically the machine and the event appear as antinomic (opposites) and therefore incapable of being resolved. It is in Given Time that the “impossible thinking” of the machine and the event is enabled in Derrida’s description of the text of Counterfeit Money as a “machine for provoking events.” This is a definition, which brings these oppositional terms together while maintaining their paradoxical and aporistic qualities, one which Derrida justifies in his subsequent extended analysis.

The text is itself an event that opens itself to reading in the here and now, but it also has a past, it has taken place, it has a present, it is present, and we anticipate that it will continue to take place in the future, i.e. it is machine-like in its repeatability. This repeatability places the event within the “order of the aleatory” (random) as such it is “pregnant with other events,” all of which have the capacity for the “staging of a trap or a deception.” Derrida describes this trap as the “affair of reason,” where the idea of “reason” is captured in the French idiom: “de la raison qu’on donne,” lit. to “give reason,” but which means to concede to the other. As idiomatic its meaning is difficult to translate from the original, with more than one possible interpretation and is therefore unstable.

Neither the text or its title, as subject or as a guarantee of the text are stable. The text seems to play with its title: “it is as if the body of the titled text became the title of the title that then becomes the true body, the false-true body…of the text, its false-true corpus, its body as ghost of a fiduciary sign, a body to be taken on credit.” (97) This leads to a destabilisation of the authority invested in texts. Our engagement with them comes down to an act of faith, expressed as both economic and spiritual, a “phenomenon of credit.” The term credit meaning both belief and authority, the institution of a corpus, a body of texts and belief, leading to the phenomenon of canonization, which is both the spiritual and a textual authority given by a body.

End
“Authority is constituted by accreditation both in the sense of legitimation as effect of belief or credulity, and of bank credit, of capitalized interest. This recalls a very fine saying of Montaigne’s, who knew all this in advance: “Our soul moves only on credit or faith [credit], being bound and constrained to the whim of others’ fancies, a slave and a captive under the authority of their teaching.” (GT, 97)

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #17

Part and Whole (GT, 94-95)
In Derrida’s analysis of Counterfeit Money, as a short story within the collection Le Spleen de Paris, the larger is constantly overrun by the smaller. The borders that frame the story, the title and the dedication, exceed the borders, which, by convention, they create. The dedication encompasses the whole of Le Spleen de Paris, in the image of a segmented serpent, which can be sliced at will. The title of Counterfeit Money is characterised as if it were the text, and the narrated story but a long note on the title. (86)

[Derrida describes this process of the part encompassing the whole as metonymic – the smaller is “metonymically” larger than the larger. A metonym is a figure of speech which Nietzsche defines as “the substitution of cause and effect” in which the part stands for the whole, for example “tongue” for “language.” The study of figures of speech was central to rhetoric, in works such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Nietzsche’s 1872 Lectures on Rhetoric and Language.]

These framing devices within a book, the title and the dedication, are by convention irremovable, and as such they are thought to provide a stable structure for what is within. [This reference to “structure” draws attention to structuralism]. Rather than a “structure” this relationship between whole and part is described by Derrida as a “movement.” A movement that also “overruns and de-borders the coded language of rhetoric,” in this case that of metonymy as a figure of speech.

Rhetorical figures rely on a stable relationship between the part and the whole. Yet in Derrida’s analysis there is never stability, only stabilization in process. Pointing to “older” more complicated and unstable structures. In what could be called a post-structuralist move, Derrida says they can be called structures as they are “not necessarily chaotic, their relative “anteriority” or their “greater complexity does not signify pure disorder.”

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #16

A topological analysis (GT, pp. 87-88)
Baudelaire’s Counterfeit Money was published as part of Le Spleen de Paris in 1855. Derrida uses the book’s spatiality, its topos to analyse the book’s dedication, one of the borders that, along with the title, one must cross before arriving at the short story, Counterfeit Money.

The written dedication, in which Baudelaire offers Le Spleen de Paris to Arsène Houssaye, is inserted in the book between the name of the author and the book’s title; as such it is a feature that appears to situate the destination of the book. [i.e. this is the place where Baudelaire “gives” the book to Houssaye] But the name of the dedicatee is not proof of the book’s effective dedication: “the destination of this dative [what is given] is not reducible to the explicit dedication…there is nothing in a text that is not dedicated.”

Putting the question of the destination of the text to one side, Derrida returns to his topological analysis of the dedication, attempting to situate it within Le Spleen de Paris. It appears not to be part of the fiction, in the same way as Counterfeit Money, yet can we be so sure? Derrida asks: “how is one to take the dedication? Is it still fiction…by what title must one receive it?” What is its place within Le Spleen de Paris, as fiction or as real?

The question of the dedication is the same as the question of its title [whether it is to be taken as true or counterfeit money], and of the whole and the part. [This echoes Levi-Strauss’s claim that one cannot construct the whole from parts. (76) For Derrida, in contradiction, the part exceeds the whole:

It is as if the title were the very text whose narrative would finally be but the gloss or a long note on the counterfeit money of the title, at the bottom of the page.” (86)

This question of the whole and the part is seen within the figure of the snake that Derrida draws our attention to; Baudelaire’s image of Le Spleen de Paris as a segmented whole, a serpent which can be cut into parts, which is given by Baudelaire to Houssaye in the dedication. Derrida leaves further questioning of this gift of a serpent, whether whole or segmented, up in the air.

More on the border

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #15

The title says: “since I say so many things at once, since I appear to title this even as I title that at the same time, since I feign reference and since, insofar as it is fictive, my reference is not an authentic, legitimate reference, well then I, as title…am counterfeit money.” (86-87)

Derrida’s analysis of the title of Baudelaire’s Counterfeit Money (pp. 84-87)
Derrida considers the short story’s title in terms of money, true and counterfeit. The title Counterfeit Money is that which guarantees that which it titles, the narrative, is entitled to be taken as what it gives itself to be, a story of counterfeit money.

Within this terminology there is always uncertainty, expressed as endless bifurcations. Derrida first makes the point that the title of Counterfeit Money does not belong to its narrative discourse. The fictive narrator of Counterfeit Money is not the author of its title, that author is Baudelaire. who is taken as real, yet the title is not foreign to the fiction. Chosen by the author, it is as fictive as the tale told in Counterfeit Money.

The title Counterfeit Money can be understood naively as a story about counterfeit money. Yet at the moment of this reading, the title is divided. It has two referents: counterfeit money itself and the text as a story about counterfeit money. Both of these referents title or titrate the title, they guarantee it. This first division of the title, “engenders many other dehiscences, virtually to infinity.” (85) The division of the title is a “dehiscence” a splitting apart. If we look at the two referents, namely, the story of counterfeit money and counterfeit money itself, we can see this division at work.

The narrative is immediately two things, it is a fiction and a fiction of fiction. It is a fiction written by Baudelaire, but it is a fiction that puts the narrative not in Baudelaire’s hand, as the writer, but in the mouth of a fictive narrator, who is not Baudelaire. This structure then folds back on itself, the fictive narrative is put forward as non-fictive by a fictive narrator, that is one who claims not to be fictive, in the fiction signed by Baudelaire.

This narrative recounts the story of a further twofold fiction, of counterfeit money, which is not a thing like any other, it is divided, it is both a sign and an incorrectly titled sign, a sign without value. The title Counterfeit Money again folds back, it is the title of the fictive text, which no longer only says: here is a story of counterfeit money, but the story as literature is itself counterfeit money. Everything that will be said, in the story, of counterfeit money can be said of the story, of the fictive text bearing this title. This text is also the coin, a piece of counterfeit money provoking an event and lending itself to this whole scene of deception, gift, forgiveness, or non-forgiveness. It is as if the title were the very text whose narrative would finally be but the gloss or a long note on the counterfeit money of the title, at the bottom of the page.

Counterfeit money is never, as such, counterfeit money. As soon as it is what it is, recognised as such, it ceases to act as and to be worth counterfeit money. (87) Derrida calls this an irreducible modality, which obligates you to “wonder what money is: true money, false money, the falsely true and the truly false and non-money which is neither true or false.” (87)

More on the border

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #13

The Relationship Between Language and the Gift (GT, 79-81)
Derrida says any definition of language is informed by a certain relationship to the gift being there in advance, it is a relationship that obliges us to think the gift. We also speak of language as a given, one received out of a “fundamental passivity.” Language “gives one to think” but it also:

Steals, spirits away from us, whispers to us, and withdraws the responsibility it seems to inaugurate, it carries off the property of our own thoughts even before we have appropriated them (80)

The scope of this double capacity of language extends beyond the spoken idiom, “to all textuality in general.”

All semantic ambivalence and the syntactico-semantic problem of giving-taking are not situated only within the words of language or the elements of a textual system. Language is also an example of it, as is any textual determination. In a riposte to structuralism Derrida goes on to say:

One must not … ask oneself, in something close to rapturous wonder, how is it possible that to give and/or to take are said this way or that way in a language, … one must remember first of all that language is … a phenomenon of gift-countergift, of giving-taking—and of exchange. All the difficulties of nomination or writing in the broad sense are also difficulties of self-naming, of self-writing. (81)

Everything said about giving-taking folds back on language and writing as giving-taking. Giving comes back, comes down to taking and taking to giving, folding over not only language or writing but the text generally “beyond its linguistic or logocentric closure, beyond its narrow or common meaning.” This “come back” redoubles endlessly not only the semantic ambivalence that Beneveniste speaks of, but also the “ambivalence of the gift as good and bad, as gift and poison (Gift-gift).” (ibid)

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #12

Following his critique of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, Jacques Derrida, in Given Time (pp. 78-81), goes on to detail a further structuralist response to Mauss’s account of gift and exchange rituals in archaic societies. That of Émile Benveniste, whose Gift and Exchange in Indo-European Vocabulary broadens Mauss’s claims of a functional relationship between the gift and exchange, to encompass Indo-European societies. Benveniste employs a structuralist approach, similar to Lévi-Strauss’s appeal to language’s “unconscious mental structure,” studying the vocabulary of ancient Indo-European societies in terms of their usages of the words that signify “to give” and “to take.”

Benveniste at first focuses on the root word dô which means “to give” (as in “donation”) across numerous archaic Indo-European languages. The certainty given by this constancy of meaning is interrupted by the discovery that the Hittite verb dâ means not “to give” but “to take.” It is accepted that they are both the same verb, raising the possibility that the original meaning of dô might have been “to take” rather than “to give.” Which then leaves the question of how “to give” could have come from “to take.”

This, on the face of it, appears as an insoluble problem, an aporia, one that Benveniste proposes to resolve through an appeal to language, in terms of syntax (sentence construction) rather than semantics (sentence/word meaning). His answer to this problem is that dô means neither give nor take “but either one or the other depending on the construction.” Derrida gives the following analogy: ‘in English, “to take something from someone” means to take something that belongs to someone, whereas “to take something to someone” means to deliver, to give something to someone.’ (79) Thus dô means “to take hold,” one can take hold in order to give or to keep. This means that language has the capacity to choose which meaning of the word to accept at the expense of the other.

Derrida’s analysis
Derrida thinks that not all the problems are resolved by this “syntactic decidability,” as it can only function against a background of “semantic ambivalence.” One in which the meanings of “to give” and “to take” are never stable, they “proclaim themselves…as notions linked by their polarity and which were susceptible of the same expression.” (79) At its root both “to give” and “to take” are linked opposites, which can be employed to express the same meaning. Thus they have both equivalence and ambivalence.

This leads Derrida to say: “if giving is not simply the contrary or something other than taking, if the gift is not totally foreign to taking, if it is not even contrary to it, then we have to take on the gift.” (81)

“In other words, what we do not yet know is whether we should take its title for legal tender…all this comes down to, comes back to the title, to the question of the title as question of credit and to the title as question of counterfeit money.” (82)

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #11

Lévi-Strauss’s Linguisticism
Jacques Derrida in Given Time (pp.76-79) claims that Lévi-Strauss’s critique of hau, in which he locates gift-giving rituals such as the potlatch within a structuralist logic of exchange and relation, effectively annuls the gift; gifts cannot be exchanged “tit for tat.” Derrida goes on to say that the question of the given-thing is not a false problem, as Lévi-Strauss would have it. One which will “dissolve in the transparent light of an Aufklärung (clearing up) of relational logic.” (76)

Derrida characterises Lévi-Strauss’s analysis as belonging “to the rationality of the principle of reason.” One which appeals to linguistic concepts such as “zero phoneme” and “floating signifiers,” in order to resolve the contradictions inherent in notions such as hau; i.e. the antithetical operations of giving and taking within one expression. In Lévi-Strauss’s reasoning hau is an empty symbol, which is there as “the conscious expression of a semantic function,” to which we bring supplementary symbolic content to complete it. Lévi-Strauss’s argument follows the reasoning of symbolic logic, a logic which “summarises the general laws of language.”

For Derrida this analysis has the effect of substituting exchange for gift in the constitution of the symbolic, in events such as the potlatch. Leading Derrida to the conclusion “there is no gift as concerns reason.” The gift allows reason and not the other way around.

Derrida then comments that Lévi-Strauss’s claim “that all social phenomena can be assimilated to language,” was important for the “hegemonic institution of French structuralism as a linguisticism in the 60s.”

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #10

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950), critiques Mauss’s notion of hau. This is the mysterious force in the gift, given in the property-exchange rituals of archaic societies, which demands its return at a later date. Hau is necessary for the gift, as it produces the synthesis between these two antithetical operations of giving and returning.

Instead of focusing on the thing that is given in the gift and its call for return, Lévi-Strauss, in line with the principles of linguistic structuralism, directs us outwards, towards the language in which these practices of gift-giving are expressed. In those societies studied, the antithesis between giving/returning does not exist, as these “antithetical operations are expressed by the same word.”

He goes on to quote from Marcel Mauss who notes, in The Gift, that “Papuan and Melanesian have one single term to designate buying and selling, lending and borrowing. “Operations that are opposites are expressed by the same word.” (GT, 75) Therefore, Lévi-Strauss claims, there is no need for hau, the “aura” of the gift, which he calls a “magical” notion.

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #9

In his 1925 essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss addresses the nature of the gifts exchanged in rituals such as the potlatch. Asking “what force is there in the given thing that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (GT, 41) Mauss names this “force” hau, a Maori word which might be translated as “aura.”

Hau signals the hidden power of the gift to demand restitution, it is that which carries out the synthesis, essential to the gift, between two antithetical operations, giving/taking or giving/returning.

Derek Hampson

Reading Given, Post #8

Jacques Derrida’s Given Time can be read in part as a critique of structuralism, the central belief of which is that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure, such as language. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Structuralism is a methodology, i.e. a body of methods, rules and beliefs, that has been applied to a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics and architecture. The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; whose “discreet and respectful critique” of Marcel Mauss is in turn critiqued by Derrida in chapter 3 of Given Time.

As an intellectual movement, structuralism was initially presumed to be the heir apparent to existentialism. However, by the late 1960s, many of structuralism’s basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida.

Derek Hampson

Reading Given Time, Post #7

From Reception to Restitution
In his 1925 essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss seeks to explain the exchange economies of archaic societies in terms of gifts given and gifts returned. Mauss approaches this through a study of the potlatch, a property-giving ritual practised by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada and the USA. He uses his account to challenge contemporary views of the potlatch’s underlying structure, which was thought as an economic cycle, of debts entered into and debts repaid, at a legally binding “due date.” Instead Mauss describes the potlatch as having a gift structure, one of “presents made” and “presents repaid,” characterising it as a process of “exchanging gifts.”

Rather than a contract between donor and donee, with an inherent due-date, the gift/countergift as theorised by Mauss is a force immanent to the thing: “a mysterious force, the thing itself demands gift and restitution.” Time is central to this, the gift cannot be reciprocated immediately, a length of time, a term, a delay must elapse before its return.

Derrida’s analysis (pp. 36-40)
Derrida points out the incongruity of Mauss’s description, gifts cannot be exchanged “tit for tat,” as this leads to their annulment. Yet the gift as given and its restitution by its return, the phenomenon of the exchanged gift, is undeniable. The gift and its exchange are joined, they are in synthesis. For Derrida this paradox constitutes the “madness of the gift,” one which informs his thinking on the subject.

He says that the syn of synthesis, which means “together,” has “an essential relation to time,” in terms of a “certain deferral/differing in time.” (38) In Derrida’s eyes the delay of the gift, its term, as a word and as the length of time of delayed return, creates a differance.* This acts as a “guardrail”** against the madness of the gift, which to be a gift must remain foreign to the circle of exchange, yet is pulled into it through its restitution, the antithesis of the gift.

Thus the temporalised thing, that which is in a neutral and homogenised time, is transformed as a gift, “temporized” – made subject to the time of delay. Derrida says this force of delay is inscribed in/upon the given-exchanged thing, in terms of “limit and time.” The thing of the gift has its essence in this demand of the “gift-counter-gift.” For Mauss the delay, the term between the reception of the gift and its restitution, forms the “original essential feature of the gift.” (39) Thus the time of delay appears as intrinsic to the gift.

*A key term for Derrida, plays on the French différer, which means both “to defer” and “to differ.”

**”Guardrail” is the translation of garde-fou, which, when translated literally, means “crazy guard.”

Marcel Duchamp: The Delay in Glass

Derek Hampson